In collaboration with Work Club and FRUKT Communications, Reactify created an online system that converts photos into short pieces of music, Loud Blue. Photos from Instagram and Twitter with the hashtag #loudblue were analysed for hundreds of points of data, and sent to a custom musical algorithm which converted them into 20-30 second clips of music. These were sent back to the original poster via Twitter.

Various musical mappings were created in order to make elements of the imagery relate to the musical results, such as dominant colour to overall genre, whether or not people are present to whether or not the track has vocals or is instrumental, and brightness of certain sections of the image relating to which chord sequences would feature in the music.

The campaign ran in Brazil in early 2013 and the best submissions were chosen to feature in an anthem put together by Felguk:

Here are a couple of samples of the kinds of pieces produced by Loud Blue:

LoudBlue 2.0

Later in 2013, the campaign was recommissioned to run in three new markets: Mexico, Argentina and Uruguay with a new range of music and sounds as well as an improved algorithm. The format was different, allowing users to upload any image of their own to a website where it was immediately scanned and a track returned for playback and submission.

Featured examples of photos and their corresponding pieces of music can be found at the Ballantine’s Loud Blue website.